Inception!

Narj · 18 May 2012 at 13:02

Has anyone had any success running a Virtual host inside a virtual host? If so, what sort of performance hit did you get?

I want to set up a virtual server temporarily on my machine for a friend to use but he needs to use virtualbox within it.

Yo dawg, etc..

Rhys · 18 May 2012 at 13:08

Its called Nested VM's.

http://www.sysprobs.com/guide-install-vmware-vsphere-5-esxi-5-vmware-workstation-windows-7

Narj · 18 May 2012 at 13:22

Rhys said:
Its called Nested VM's.

http://www.sysprobs.com/guide-install-vmware-vsphere-5-esxi-5-vmware-workstation-windows-7

Great, although there's no mention of say, VMWare Workstation inside VMWare Workstation. I was planning on using VirtualBox in all honesty so would be interested to hear of any success stories/pitfalls with it.

I'll give it a go myself tonight but any advice is appreciated. I take it the tools will have issues installing/working in any case.

StooM · 18 May 2012 at 16:39

Ive done this a few times in various guises, though mainly Workstation > ESX > hosts.

It seems to run ok on my laptop (i7 64bit Win7 8Gb Ram) but with any kind of load it does tend to crawl with a few machines online.

For most lab stuff it will be fine, but any intensive services (either cpu/ram/disk IO) it will affect the rest without any QOS/sharing etc setup..

anything I don't mind · 18 May 2012 at 17:05

I once installed esxi inside vmware workstation and connected to it with vsphere but i did not create any vms inside the esxi because it was too slow.

J1nxy · 18 May 2012 at 17:23

I run ESXi and hyper-v inside workstation for testing VDI and its ok. Know of Parallels Containers being run on top of ESXi as well. Most performance is down to the disk system being hammered so if you do it try to have multiple drives and a lot of memory to stop swapping.

J.B · 19 May 2012 at 10:29

I hosted a Windows VM on ESXi inside a VirtualBox machine on my work laptop. All things considered it was surprisingly responsive.

I wasn't doing anything crazy though, just general usage

Saundie · 19 May 2012 at 11:18

Out of curiousity I just tried nesting VMWare Workstation within VMWare Workstation using Windows 7 hosts - other than a warning about this resulting in degraded performance, it seems to work fine. I've also nested Hyper-V within VMWare for lab purposes. As others have suggested, the performance of the second level VM isn't exactly stellar (having the VMs hosted on an SSD seems to help though).